Compare and contrast the most important points and key details presented in two texts on the same topic.

Enroll Students Into Learning

5 minutes

To begin the lesson, I remind the students that yesterday, we read the text So You Want to be President? by Judith St. George. After reading, we took notes about the main components of this text, so I ask the students to recount the components of this text. We review the following components: main idea, supporting details, author’s purpose, tone of the text, illustrations that support the text, or any other text features. Then I simply ask the students: “Did you enjoy that text?” I ask the kids to turn and talk to their neighbor for no more than one minute about if they enjoyed the text and why or why not.

Experience Learning

5 minutes

After a few moments, I regain the students’ attention using the “If You Can Hear My Voice…” strategy (see my “Strategy Folder” for more information). I ask the kids to share some of their conversations with our class now. The students raise their hands and take turn explaining what they and their neighbor discussed.

Now that we have reviewed the text we’ve read and discussed how we felt about the text, it’s time to talk about what we’re going to read today! I tell the students that today, we’ll be reading a different text, but also on the topic of presidents as well! I flip to our anchor chart on informational text. I tell the students that today, as we’re reading another informational text about the presidents, we will also be looking for the components we looked for in yesterday’s text. I review our informational text anchor chart to review again what components we may encounter in an informational text. We review the chart as students take turns explaining each component of the chart to our class.

Commentary on Informational Text Features.mov

Informational Text Features Chart.jpg

Label New Learning

5 minutes

After we finish reviewing the components of the informational text anchor chart, we’re ready to read! So I tell my students, “Okay third graders! We’re ready to read! As we’re reading through the informational text today, let’s try to identifying all of these same components from our chart!” Now the students know what we’re going to read the next informational text (John, Paul, George, & Ben by Lane Smith) and our purpose is to look for the and identify the components of this text using what we know about it’s text structure.

Demonstrate Skills

Student head back to their seats as our paper passers help pass out our text for today. The text we’re reading today is John, Paul, George, & Ben written by Lane Smith. We start by making a few predictions about what might happen in this story, and then take a look through the text to familiarize ourselves with the layout of the text, illustrations, and any other text features we find. I remind the students that today, we’ll be thinking about what the components of an informational text look like in this book: what’s the main idea, what details can we find to support the main idea, are there illustrations that are used to help the reader understand the text, are there additional text features that a reader could use to help understand the text or learn additional information, etc. Then we start reading! As we read, we stop and discuss the features we’re looking for!

When students are finished reading, I tell the students that their important work of finding the components within this lesson was great, and we’ll use their work in another way later this week, so I tell the students that we’ll need to make a few notes about what we’ve identified today. As a class, with students leading the input, we take notes on the components of John, Paul, George, & Ben on the “John, Paul, George, & Ben Notes Page”. As the students identify each component working through the chart, I make a note on the Smart Board and they make their notes on their own individual papers as well.

John, Paul, George, & Ben by Lane Smith.jpg

Comparing Two Texts on the Same Topic-John, Paul, George, & Ben.pdf

Student Work Sample.png

Review

5 minutes

To close today, I want to explain to my students how their identifying of the components within today’s text will carry over into tomorrow’s work, so I explain that tomorrow, we will take both sets of notes that they’ve accomplished from yesterday’s and today’s work, and begin to discuss how the texts are similar and different. I tell them what a great job they did today with their notes, and then we tuck our notes into our reading folders to save them for another day’s work!